I’ve been away for a while, and just updated to the latest client.
Unfortunately, the battle.net client happily updated WoW before I realized that the minimum system requirements have been increased to macOS 10.12. I’m running El Cap 10.11.6
I can launch and log in and do some things, but all the item icons are either glitched, or wrong (linen showing for dagger, fishing pole showing for stone form, etc).
i.imgur[.]com/dmgtV7c.png
i.imgur[.]com/ohZsHcB.png
Then, when opening certain panes (inspect player, talents) it hard crashes WoW and the system, and I have to use the power button to reboot (cmd-opt-esc is unresponsive)
Though I’m running El Cap, I have a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM and an AMD HD 7950 with 3GB of VRAM (Metal capable), and have always been able to run WoW at fairly high gfx settings.
Just so I understand correctly…
A game that will run on Windows 7 (which was released in 2009 and last updated in 2011!) will NOT run on Mac OS X 10.11 (Released in 2015 and last updated in June 2018)? Is this correct?
Also:
5/31/19 2:35:03.000 PM kernel[0]: process World of Warcraf[1075] thread 27333 caught burning CPU!; EXC_RESOURCE supressed due to audio playback
5/31/19 2:55:38.000 PM kernel[0]: World of Warcraf[571] triggered unnest of range 0x7fff98a00000->0x7fff98c00000 of DYLD shared region in VM map 0x12ddd78fec04daf1. While not abnormal for debuggers, this increases system memory footprint until the target exits.
I’ve been playing WoW on Macs since 2006 and this is the first time it has EVER crashed and taken down any of my Mac Systems.
The reason it’s harder to support older macOS versions than Window versions is because on macOS the graphics drivers are tied to the OS. On Windows 7, you can still get Nvidia/AMD/Intel graphics drivers that were released a few weeks ago. If we find a driver bug on macOS and report it to Apple, Apple will fix it in the next minor release of their current OS. The only way to update your graphics drivers on macOS is to update macOS versions (other than the Nvidia web driver).
As it stands, 10.11 metal drivers are pretty buggy and not very performant. 10.11 was the first major release with metal and there have been a lot of improvements to performance and stability since then. On 10.11.6, the AMD drivers are “ok”, Nvidia drivers have a lot of correctness bugs and the Intel drivers crash a lot.
If you can manage to update your machine to 10.12, you’ll get a lot better metal drivers. Each major release is quite a bit faster and more stable, generally speaking. I’m not sure if you can just update from the app store, but if not, I know there are some guides for getting newer macOS versions on the old mac pros.
Thanx for your reply, it’s really appreciated. I am aware of what Apple has been doing regarding gfx drivers and the OS… but I don’t have to like it. 
It’s frustrating to say the least. Especially when the ONLY visible indication of any issue was the rendering of 2D item icons. All other gfx effects rendered just fine (particles, fog, distance, water, AA, etc). Why on earth would something like 2D sprite rendering need to be tied to a driver update that’s dependent on an OS update? Just seems ridiculous.
Having said all that, I did just install High Sierra (10.13.6) on a separate partition, and that seemed to fix the problem. As a 30yr Mac geek and former early adopter of all Mac OS releases, let’s just say that I’m not thrilled with the direction that Apple seems to be going with their OS over the past couple years. I’m pretty sure this machine will run Mojave, but I dislike forced upgrades when everything is working fine otherwise. So for now, I can boot into 10.13 to play.
Trivia: I bought this machine specifically to be able to play WoW back when you guys dropped PowerPC support (Dec 2010).
ETA:
Just an FYI… installing clean icons fixes the item icons (and the crashes), and allows running WoW in El Cap with no problems. This would suggest that this is NOT an OS/graphics driver problem.